PS. Nice try with the "in absentia" thing, but that's not what I'm saying and you know it. Every judicial system I know of allows the police to arrest someone before they've been convicted. Get a grip.
I have never once, here or elsewhere, "insisted" (or even just "said") that Assange raped anyone. I am in no position to state that with any degree of certainty. What he is is wanted on suspicion of rape. There's enough evidence for a court to have issued a warrant for his arrest. I would not get away with refusing to comply. You would not get away with refusing to comply. Why should he?
Serial sex crimes? Having consensual sex over a few days and staying in the morning to have breakfast together constitutes sex crimes?
It isn't the consensual sex that is the issue, but the nonconsensual sex, i.e. the rape and molestation. I'm not sure how you missed or misunderstood that.
Can you prove the rape and molestation? By other means than "he said, she said"?
No, that's the prosecution's job. If you are trying to claim that "innocent until proven guilty" means you can't even arrest a man until he's been tried and convicted, then you're setting up a nice little paradox, cos you can't try someone without arresting them first!!!
All reference to these things have largely vanished from the internet
In other words, you're just pulling this stuff out of your ass.
No, what he means is that the Great Global Conspiracy is able to deactivate anything and everything they want from the internet at the touch of a button. He is, unfortunately, incapable of rationally evaluating that the very existence of Wikileaks is disproof of this. (and the existence of DeCSS, and child porn, and bomb-making manuals etc etc ad nauseum)
The women didn't appeal to have the charges reinstated, a lawyer did so without the knowledge of the women.
If this is true (citation needed) then you have a choice of two theories: A) an ambitious lawyer wants to make a name for himself B) Big Nasty Global Conspiracy.
Surprisingly enough, I find option A more plausible.
And the kicker is that for each allegation, it is one person's word against another. No sensible court would even agree to have such a case heard.
So why did any further "investigation" take place?
Erm.... what?!? A great many crimes are a question of one person's word against another, and I assure you that these are heard in courts all over the world. Life ain't all CSI forensics, you know!
No, the Monroe Doctrine is a doctrine of mutual defence -- "we will defend our neighbours from colonial invasion cos we might be next". The modern interpretation of it as "me USA, me king of all America" is something else. Suggesting the Monroe Doctrine has anything to do with the reality of US interventionism is like calling Jesus a warmonger just because Dubya calls himself a Christian.
If he's so unimportant, why insists Sweden on a witness statement given on swedish soil? (Yes, the extradition request is for a witness! It's not as if the state attorney already has filed charges.).
IANAL. From the sounds of it you aren't either. Because any lawyer would know that different countries have different laws. You also clearly don't actively seek to inform yourself, because it is now well-known thanks to news reports) that in Sweden, you can only be charged with an offence after interview. They arrest you, they interview you, they file charges.
Assange is not being called to give a "witness statement", he's being arrested in order to be formally interviewed as part of the established criminal process in Swedish law.
Nothing in the article makes a solid distinction between "video games" and "application software", and there's a danger that the bundling of games into "app stores" such as Apple's clouds the figures. The phrase "emerging mobile application development" kind of makes me worried here. Certainly app stores like big headline figures, so their reporting won't always make that distinction, and a lot of leisure software isn't really "games".
I distinctly remember reading allegedly leaked emails in which MegaUpload staff discussed selecting specific uploaders to offer financial incentives to upload more, and it was alleged that they knew full well that these uploaders were not quite legit. This is what made MegaUpload the easy target for the copyright litigation lobby. NOT that they're sharing profits, but that they (allegedly) were knowingly and actively complicit in the sharing of infringing goods. If this is proven wrong, fine. But the allegation is that MegaUpload went beyond other hosts.
RapidShare's payouts may have encouraged piracy indirectly, but MegaUpload specifically and knowingly targetted pirates with cash payouts.
As I've said elsewhere, I believe the appropriate approach is to establish the difference between a casual user (who the host doesn't need to know anything about) and a major "client", who the host has to perform due dilligence on, as any other business-to-business service would.
Car analogy: A getaway driver is an accessory to a crime. A taxi driver isn't an accessory if he didn't know the fare was fleeing the scene of the crime at the time. There's a lot about "intent" in law....
Because we DEFINITELY want a precedent that, rather than punish actually illegal behavior, we should punish people who inform others about potentially illegal behavior.
Sure, the "go here for teh warez!" sites are an issue, but they're not doing anything against the law. Where do you stop when you try to stop non-illegal activities?
Ermmmm... the only reason it's not illegal is that there isn't a law against it... yet. We can write new laws, you know. These sites are a problem, so they should be illegal. Let's pass laws that ban them, then!
Of course, RapidShare shouldn't be entirely off the hook -- there should also be laws that make a clear legal distinction between a casual user (protecting web companies from having to do due dilligence on every single user) and a heavy user (who must be considered a contractual client/supplier, and usual business due dilligence therefore applies). So a single wedding video that gets downloaded by a few dozen friends and family wouldn't require investigation, but an account hosting 100 DVD ISOs, each downloaded by a thousand people certainly would....
Making linking illegal will pretty much kill the internet.
Uh-huh. I'll assume that you're being purposefully disengenuous. I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting you're unable to make a distinction between "knowingly and purposefully linking to infringing content" and "linking".
I won't insult your intelligence by trying to explain the difference, or by analogising your statement to a claim that laws against (physical) theft are "making picking things up" illegal."
Likewise, by conflating the infringing of a legal monopoly with theft or piracy, the argument is tainted and hope of rational argument quickly goes out of the window. Accepting the propaganda labels of cartels that the important distinctions aren't important is a major loss to finding a reasonable outcome.
I'm sorry, but you appear to be ignorant of the origin of the term "piracy" to refer to acts of copyright infringement.
Several decades ago, there was a radio station called Radio Caroline, and it broadcast from a ferry anchored in international waters off the coast of South-East England. Then along came Radio Atlanta, a little bit further north.
The term "pirate radio" was born, to describe unlicensed, off-shore broadcasts. As happens in language, the term gained new usages, and came to refer to all unlicensed broadcasts, including (strictly illegal) shore-based pirate stations.
As the term "pirate" was now established in this sense, it was a natural evolution for it to be applied during the boom in home-taping and market-stall trading.
It is not industry propaganda, it is an established usage. What would you prefer? "Counterfeiting" doesn't work. Should we invent a new term? Why not just accept the established one?
Try finding a file on RapidShare directly from Google -- you can't. For pirates to use RapidShare to spread warez, they've got to link to it from some external site. There's a whole pile of video streaming sites that are little more than a catalogue of links to RapidShare, MegaUpload (RIP) and the like. Those sites are the ones that are actively spreading the material even though they don't host it themselves. They are the ones that the law should be set up to chase. I've never seen any evidence of RapidShare actively encouraging pirating (unlike MegaUpload, who offered cash incentives to prolific pirates) and I've seen lots of people use RapidShare for legitimate, non-infringing purposes.
If the authorities were to move against RapidShare, who would be next? I can do illegal filesharing from a DropBox account, Live Drive or Google Drive....
Unfortunately Pink's argument is built on flawed premises, or at least management don't understand it. The experiments cited don't really apply to a salaried worker, because what they've provided is a short-term goal. The short-term goal is supposed to be "get the candle on the wall", but instead it is "get the money". My salary is not a short-term goal, so it doesn't distract from my day-to-day goals; i.e. I'm thinking "I need to price up a replacement router so we can offer public internet access in the cafe," not "I need to price up a replacement router so that I get paid."
This has encouraged a management double-standard -- it becomes the boardroom excuse for freezing staff salaries, but at the executive end they say "it's not about motivation, I need to be paid lots to stop me moving to a competitor."
That's because we see everything relatively. Cocks are relative to balls. So small balls mean an exaggerated perception of cock size, particularly in closeup.
Semantic whitespace is the ultimate consequence of the myth of human-readable code.
Myth? Myth?Myth?
Yes, myth. I cannot read code without an editor -- it's just a series of hexadecimal codes until such time as the editor maps it to a character set. And those hexadecimal codes have to be interpreted from a series of bits by a computer, reconstructing them from binary digits according to the endianness used by the system. And those bits are determined by reading the polarity of tiny magnets.
All code editors now have bracket matching -- they understand code structure easier and quicker than we do as operators. Why should I indent? Why not have the editor do that automatically, thus highlighting logical flaws in my code?
I mean, when we copy and paste code, the indentation at the paste point could be quite different from the copy point. I imagine the best IDEs will by now do indentation correction on Python. As they should do. So why not let them handle and render all indentation?
The presence of Steam on Linux offers freedom of choice, which is surely the most important freedom of all. The availability of more software does nothing to restrict the software that's already available. Did people decry DeCSS as bringing DRMed material to Linux? Of course not -- it opened choices.
And besides, increased trade will lead to a healthier ecosystem -- it's in Valve's interests that hardware manufacturers provide better Linux support, something which the average Linux user will definitely benefit from.
The appropriate way of dealing with an unimportant image is to use an empty alt attribute (alt=""). This is intended to force the author to think properly about what they're doing.
No, "alt" was included because HTML is semantic markup, and there should be no assumptions made about rendering technology. The IMG tag was always a bit of a (necessary) hack, because an image file isn't semantic.
Slashdot Mirror
PS. Nice try with the "in absentia" thing, but that's not what I'm saying and you know it. Every judicial system I know of allows the police to arrest someone before they've been convicted. Get a grip.
I have never once, here or elsewhere, "insisted" (or even just "said") that Assange raped anyone. I am in no position to state that with any degree of certainty. What he is is wanted on suspicion of rape. There's enough evidence for a court to have issued a warrant for his arrest. I would not get away with refusing to comply. You would not get away with refusing to comply. Why should he?
Serial sex crimes? Having consensual sex over a few days and staying in the morning to have breakfast together constitutes sex crimes?
It isn't the consensual sex that is the issue, but the nonconsensual sex, i.e. the rape and molestation. I'm not sure how you missed or misunderstood that.
Can you prove the rape and molestation? By other means than "he said, she said"?
No, that's the prosecution's job. If you are trying to claim that "innocent until proven guilty" means you can't even arrest a man until he's been tried and convicted, then you're setting up a nice little paradox, cos you can't try someone without arresting them first!!!
All reference to these things have largely vanished from the internet
In other words, you're just pulling this stuff out of your ass.
No, what he means is that the Great Global Conspiracy is able to deactivate anything and everything they want from the internet at the touch of a button. He is, unfortunately, incapable of rationally evaluating that the very existence of Wikileaks is disproof of this. (and the existence of DeCSS, and child porn, and bomb-making manuals etc etc ad nauseum)
The women didn't appeal to have the charges reinstated, a lawyer did so without the knowledge of the women.
If this is true (citation needed) then you have a choice of two theories: A) an ambitious lawyer wants to make a name for himself B) Big Nasty Global Conspiracy.
Surprisingly enough, I find option A more plausible.
And the kicker is that for each allegation, it is one person's word against another. No sensible court would even agree to have such a case heard. So why did any further "investigation" take place?
Erm.... what?!? A great many crimes are a question of one person's word against another, and I assure you that these are heard in courts all over the world. Life ain't all CSI forensics, you know!
No, the Monroe Doctrine is a doctrine of mutual defence -- "we will defend our neighbours from colonial invasion cos we might be next". The modern interpretation of it as "me USA, me king of all America" is something else. Suggesting the Monroe Doctrine has anything to do with the reality of US interventionism is like calling Jesus a warmonger just because Dubya calls himself a Christian.
If he's so unimportant, why insists Sweden on a witness statement given on swedish soil? (Yes, the extradition request is for a witness! It's not as if the state attorney already has filed charges.).
IANAL. From the sounds of it you aren't either. Because any lawyer would know that different countries have different laws. You also clearly don't actively seek to inform yourself, because it is now well-known thanks to news reports) that in Sweden, you can only be charged with an offence after interview. They arrest you, they interview you, they file charges.
Assange is not being called to give a "witness statement", he's being arrested in order to be formally interviewed as part of the established criminal process in Swedish law.
Nothing in the article makes a solid distinction between "video games" and "application software", and there's a danger that the bundling of games into "app stores" such as Apple's clouds the figures. The phrase "emerging mobile application development" kind of makes me worried here. Certainly app stores like big headline figures, so their reporting won't always make that distinction, and a lot of leisure software isn't really "games".
I distinctly remember reading allegedly leaked emails in which MegaUpload staff discussed selecting specific uploaders to offer financial incentives to upload more, and it was alleged that they knew full well that these uploaders were not quite legit. This is what made MegaUpload the easy target for the copyright litigation lobby. NOT that they're sharing profits, but that they (allegedly) were knowingly and actively complicit in the sharing of infringing goods. If this is proven wrong, fine. But the allegation is that MegaUpload went beyond other hosts.
RapidShare's payouts may have encouraged piracy indirectly, but MegaUpload specifically and knowingly targetted pirates with cash payouts.
As I've said elsewhere, I believe the appropriate approach is to establish the difference between a casual user (who the host doesn't need to know anything about) and a major "client", who the host has to perform due dilligence on, as any other business-to-business service would.
Car analogy: A getaway driver is an accessory to a crime. A taxi driver isn't an accessory if he didn't know the fare was fleeing the scene of the crime at the time. There's a lot about "intent" in law....
Just as there are plenty of legitimate "fair use" purposes for copying or downloading, which would otherwise be infringement.
Fair use only applies to the end-user though -- the distributor is still in the wrong.
Because we DEFINITELY want a precedent that, rather than punish actually illegal behavior, we should punish people who inform others about potentially illegal behavior.
Sure, the "go here for teh warez!" sites are an issue, but they're not doing anything against the law. Where do you stop when you try to stop non-illegal activities?
Ermmmm... the only reason it's not illegal is that there isn't a law against it... yet. We can write new laws, you know. These sites are a problem, so they should be illegal. Let's pass laws that ban them, then!
Of course, RapidShare shouldn't be entirely off the hook -- there should also be laws that make a clear legal distinction between a casual user (protecting web companies from having to do due dilligence on every single user) and a heavy user (who must be considered a contractual client/supplier, and usual business due dilligence therefore applies). So a single wedding video that gets downloaded by a few dozen friends and family wouldn't require investigation, but an account hosting 100 DVD ISOs, each downloaded by a thousand people certainly would....
Making linking illegal will pretty much kill the internet.
Uh-huh. I'll assume that you're being purposefully disengenuous. I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting you're unable to make a distinction between "knowingly and purposefully linking to infringing content" and "linking".
I won't insult your intelligence by trying to explain the difference, or by analogising your statement to a claim that laws against (physical) theft are "making picking things up" illegal."
Likewise, by conflating the infringing of a legal monopoly with theft or piracy, the argument is tainted and hope of rational argument quickly goes out of the window. Accepting the propaganda labels of cartels that the important distinctions aren't important is a major loss to finding a reasonable outcome.
I'm sorry, but you appear to be ignorant of the origin of the term "piracy" to refer to acts of copyright infringement.
Several decades ago, there was a radio station called Radio Caroline, and it broadcast from a ferry anchored in international waters off the coast of South-East England. Then along came Radio Atlanta, a little bit further north.
The term "pirate radio" was born, to describe unlicensed, off-shore broadcasts. As happens in language, the term gained new usages, and came to refer to all unlicensed broadcasts, including (strictly illegal) shore-based pirate stations.
As the term "pirate" was now established in this sense, it was a natural evolution for it to be applied during the boom in home-taping and market-stall trading.
It is not industry propaganda, it is an established usage. What would you prefer? "Counterfeiting" doesn't work. Should we invent a new term? Why not just accept the established one?
Try finding a file on RapidShare directly from Google -- you can't. For pirates to use RapidShare to spread warez, they've got to link to it from some external site. There's a whole pile of video streaming sites that are little more than a catalogue of links to RapidShare, MegaUpload (RIP) and the like. Those sites are the ones that are actively spreading the material even though they don't host it themselves. They are the ones that the law should be set up to chase. I've never seen any evidence of RapidShare actively encouraging pirating (unlike MegaUpload, who offered cash incentives to prolific pirates) and I've seen lots of people use RapidShare for legitimate, non-infringing purposes.
If the authorities were to move against RapidShare, who would be next? I can do illegal filesharing from a DropBox account, Live Drive or Google Drive....
Some TED lecture on that topic.
Unfortunately Pink's argument is built on flawed premises, or at least management don't understand it. The experiments cited don't really apply to a salaried worker, because what they've provided is a short-term goal. The short-term goal is supposed to be "get the candle on the wall", but instead it is "get the money". My salary is not a short-term goal, so it doesn't distract from my day-to-day goals; i.e. I'm thinking "I need to price up a replacement router so we can offer public internet access in the cafe," not "I need to price up a replacement router so that I get paid."
This has encouraged a management double-standard -- it becomes the boardroom excuse for freezing staff salaries, but at the executive end they say "it's not about motivation, I need to be paid lots to stop me moving to a competitor."
That's because we see everything relatively. Cocks are relative to balls. So small balls mean an exaggerated perception of cock size, particularly in closeup.
Semantic whitespace is the ultimate consequence of the myth of human-readable code.
Myth? Myth? Myth?
Yes, myth. I cannot read code without an editor -- it's just a series of hexadecimal codes until such time as the editor maps it to a character set. And those hexadecimal codes have to be interpreted from a series of bits by a computer, reconstructing them from binary digits according to the endianness used by the system. And those bits are determined by reading the polarity of tiny magnets.
All code editors now have bracket matching -- they understand code structure easier and quicker than we do as operators. Why should I indent? Why not have the editor do that automatically, thus highlighting logical flaws in my code?
I mean, when we copy and paste code, the indentation at the paste point could be quite different from the copy point. I imagine the best IDEs will by now do indentation correction on Python. As they should do. So why not let them handle and render all indentation?
The presence of Steam on Linux offers freedom of choice, which is surely the most important freedom of all. The availability of more software does nothing to restrict the software that's already available. Did people decry DeCSS as bringing DRMed material to Linux? Of course not -- it opened choices.
And besides, increased trade will lead to a healthier ecosystem -- it's in Valve's interests that hardware manufacturers provide better Linux support, something which the average Linux user will definitely benefit from.
Isn't there a picture meme for this yet?
"Junk DNA" is a myth. Some idiot decided that just because he didn't know what it did, that it must do nothing. Now go away and learn some science.
The appropriate way of dealing with an unimportant image is to use an empty alt attribute (alt=""). This is intended to force the author to think properly about what they're doing.
No, "alt" was included because HTML is semantic markup, and there should be no assumptions made about rendering technology. The IMG tag was always a bit of a (necessary) hack, because an image file isn't semantic.